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Christopher R. Hill, former US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia, was US Ambassador to Iraq, South Korea, Macedonia, and Poland, a US special envoy for Kosovo, a negotiator of the Dayton Peace Accords, and the chief US negotiator with North Korea from 2005-2009. He is Chief Advisor to the Chancellor for Global Engagement and Professor of the Practice in Diplomacy at the University of Denver, and the author of Outpost.

Nice commentary. Foreign policy in a time of winding down wars and seemingly fewer threats from our decade-old enemy makes the issues even more prone to tropes. Iran dominates the debates, but deeper questions are there. This helps explain the thoughts of some Romney advisors:

Here is a sentence from the article:
"...The good news is that there is plenty of historical evidence to suggest that, once in office, the candidate develops an understanding of the issues and a feel for the nuances in managing them – a fact that should be calming to the international public..."
With all due respect I do not share this optimism, moreover I do not remember one American administration that had any deep understanding of the dynamics of foreign policy in recent years, we have enough evidence of the "elephant in the china store" behavior from the Yugoslavian war through all the Middle East engagements to Afghanistan, or even the non-military crisis situations the US was involved in.
To be fair this is not only an American problem, even the western European nations have no understanding of the Balkan or Eastern Europe, and today we can see how "sensitively" they deal with the Southern European nations as they have become burdens from good good, obliging consumers in the Eurozone.
Simply the US is the biggest bully thus what they do is more obvious than what other nations are doing.
This behavior simply comes from our inherent human nature when in whatever we are doing we only care about our own self interest and we truly do not care about others except how much we can use them for our own purposes.
This is how we evolved beside each other up to this point.
The reason it is becoming more of a problem today is that today we do not exists side by side, but we have become so integrated that we overlap on multiple levels, thus with any selfish, self centered action we cause much greater damage than ever before.
The laws of integral systems dictate that in such an interconnected network that we exist in today before any calculation and action we have to take into consideration all the elements of the system, make sure that the planned action introduces an overall positive effect into the system, and only "pull the trigger" when these main conditions are met.
We have selfish reasons to do so. Any negative influence we introduce to an integral system magnifies and comes back to us as a boomerang with multiple force.
This is not simply a theory any more, through the global crisis we see evidence of it each day.
Thus "learning on the job" is simply not good enough in our interdependent system that is already tensed enough, we need selfless leaders with global vision, who can work as team players, rising above selfish agendas or personal legacies.
Unfortunately the American Presidential system is geared exactly the opposite way, so hopefully the next candidate will learn on the job fairly quickly...